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| 2021 publication |
But to turn the story of COVID-19 into a morality play—The Populists’ Nemesis—is to miss the more profound systemic and societal failure that occurred, in a way that future historians will surely see as facile.
These ills of government are an American, not a democratic, disease. Many other democracies handled this pandemic effectively, better than any dictatorship.
As the Christian scholar N. T. Wright explains, worldviews “are like the foundations of a house: vital, but invisible. They are that through which, not at which, a society or an individual normally looks.”
Process goals encouraged me to enjoy the present moment. They are brief and achievable. I set up process goals and fun tasks and projects so that I never had to worry about future “outcome” goals. The best futures get created in the present moment.
The statement “To travel is better than to arrive” comes back to mind again and stays. We have been traveling and now we will arrive. For me a period of depression comes on when I reach a temporary goal like this and have to reorient myself toward another one.
Compare Pirsig's comment with the immediately preceding quote from Steve Chandler.
But if I were to put it [the current sorry state of American politics] in a single sentence, I would say: Inequality undermined the common faith that Americans need to create a successful multi-everything democracy. The postindustrial era has concentrated political and economic power in just a few hands and denied ordinary people control of their own lives. Overwhelmed by unfathomably large forces, Americans can no longer think and act as fellow citizens. We look for answers in private panaceas, fixed ideas, group identities, dreams of the future and the past, saviors of different types—everywhere but in ourselves. When none of these sets us free, we turn against one another.
Call its ["Progressives," "Social Justice Warriors"] narrative Just America. It’s another rebellion from below. As Real America [~the Trump crowd] breaks down the ossified libertarianism of Free America [libertarian, pro-business], Just America assaults the complacent meritocracy of Smart America [high educated]. It does the hard, essential thing that the other three narratives avoid, that white Americans have avoided throughout our history. It forces us to see the straight line that runs from slavery and segregation to the second-class life so many Black Americans live today—the betrayal of equality that has always been the country’s great moral shame, the dark heart of its social problems.
The self-assertive shrillness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure that protestors can never win an argument; the indignant self-righteousness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure equally that the protestors can never lose an argument either. Hence the utterance of protest is characteristically addressed to those who already share the protestors’ premises. The effects of incommensurability ensure that protestors rarely have anyone else to talk to but themselves. This is not to say that protest cannot be effective; it is to say that it cannot be rationally effective and that its dominant modes of expression give evidence of a certain perhaps unconscious awareness of this.
